Interior designer talks us through her spa and club designs at New York’s Hudson Yards, a mix of intimate and cinematic in timber, stone and oxidised metal
- Hong Kong interior designer Joyce Wang riffed on the blues and greys of a former train yard beside the Hudson River in her club and spa designs for the Equinox Hotel
- Repetition and reflective materials in the staircases and the indoor pool generate a sense of motion
It’s winter in New York and a cold wind blows off the Hudson River, barrelling through the streets and lifting the bare branches of trees. At Hudson Yards, where trees have yet to grow, the wind gusts between the plaza’s steel-and-glass towers and whirls through The Vessel – the sculpture at its centre – on which visitors traipse despite the arctic chill.
Joyce Wang, who designed the hotel’s club and spa, used a palette of timber, stone and oxidised metal, aiming to capture the tension between the site’s industrial heritage and Hudson Yards’ new position as a sanctuary within the city.
“We took concept cues from the history of Hudson Yards, which was full of visual inspiration,” she says. “Suspended above a train terminus, with unparalleled views of the Hudson River, we wanted to capture the industrial rawness of the railways beneath us.”
At the Equinox she lends her sensitive approach to materials and flair for creating spaces that feel at once intimate and cinematic to a sprawling high-end fitness complex that features heated indoor and outdoor pools, a pool deck with a monumental Jaume Plensa sculpture, yoga and barre studios, and a spa offering techno-therapy treatments, including an exhilarating – and terrifying – cryotherapy chamber cooled to minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 110 degrees Celsius).
